It
may be that the critical decision not to pursue shorter work hours
in our national policy came in the late 1950s. Most have forgotten,
for instance, that the youthful Richard Nixon, in the heat of the
1956 presidential campaign, spoke enthusiastically of the day, not
too far distant, when Americans would be working only four days
a week and family life will be even more fully enjoyed by every
American. (The Eisenhower administration dismissed this speech
as "an unstaffed idea.") The prospect that American workers
would be increasingly displaced by technological innovation and investment
in labor-saving equipment caused policymakers to consider
whether reduced work hours might help to maintain balance in the job
market.

In
1959, the U.S. Senate established a Senate Special Committee
on Unemployment, chaired by Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota,
to consider policies that might alleviate potential problems of unemployment
brought about by automation and technological change. Although this
committee considered the shorter-workweek option, it was not then
recommended because committee members thought that other, less pervasive
options ought to be tried first. Policymakers in the future could
always come back to this, the committee felt, if need be. That never
happened.

Labor
policies were then thought to be subject to tripartite decisionmaking.
Business, labor, and government were the key players. The business
community was, as always, implacably set against this kind of proposal.
Labor, if it could convince the government, could have tipped the
scales in that direction. The problem was that rank-and-file union
members had lost their appetite for idealistic struggles to shorten
the workweek. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, with its provision
for time-and-a-half pay for overtime work, created a perverse incentive
for workers to seek long hours in the interest of earning more money.
Without union support, the proposal for shorter work hours would go
nowhere.

Whats
more, government was also against this proposal. In the early 1960s,
during the Kennedy administration, the federal government was settling
into its new role of building an empire to fight the Cold War. If
there was a missile gap, it, of course, had to be filled.
Vice President Johnson, when a U.S. Senator from Texas, had once commented:
Candor and frankness compel me to tell you that, in my opinion,
the 40-hour week will not produce missiles. Kennedys Secretary
of Labor, Arthur Goldberg, said: It is my considered view that
the effect of a general reduction in the workweek at the present time
would be to impair adversely our present stable price structure by
adding increased costs that industry as a whole cannot bear.
In short: We have other plans.

After
the military insurgency in Vietnam progressed from a brushfire
into a full-scale military conflict involving a massive commitment
of personnel and logistical support, U.S. policymakers were all the
more convinced that we could not afford to let working people have
more leisure time. These people had to be kept working long and hard
to pay for all the new government commitments along with the social
programs of the Great Society. Guns and butter were what
leaders of the federal government thought would be good for America,
not additional free time for the nations working people.

The
Vietnam commitment became a quagmire which consumed the Presidencies
of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. No longer young and idealistic,
President Nixon was beset on all sides by enemies and new challenges.
He was no longer in a position to promise the American worker anything
even if he had been so inclined. The same was true of the Ford, Carter,
and Reagan administrations, and of the administrations of their successors.
By this time, the labor movement was a shadow of its former self.
Government commitments weighed heavily upon the society. Presidential
libraries were more in vogue than promises to the American worker.

However,
there was one man who had not forgotten. That was the former chair
of the 1959 Senate Special Committee on Unemployment, Eugene McCarthy.
Former Senator McCarthy, who had briefly been a monk at St. Johns
University, was not much into monument building. As he had famously
been opposed to the carnage in Vietnam, McCarthy remained concerned
about waste in all its various forms fueling U.S. economic growth.
Longer work hours were not going towards a better or greater society,
he believed, but toward wasteful habits of consumption.

Therefore,
reduced work hours remained a theme in McCarthys later political
campaigns. I was privileged to have coauthored a book with the former
Senator on this subject which came out in 1989. Its title was Nonfinancial
Economics: The Case for Shorter Hours of Work. How could the
economy grow without making people happier or more prosperous? That
was the question we were addressing at this point in time. An opportunity
had been missed.